1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to data management, and in particular to providing a mechanism to index and retrieve data managed within one or more data repositories in order to provide the data with a desired level of detail and based upon user preferences.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Legal documents, documents that may need to be preserved due to legal holds or containing answers to Attorney questions, as well as business or regulatory documents are example market segments for which many businesses need data mining and control assistance. Since the volume of digital data that companies generate is growing at a significant rate (e.g., 60%-120%) annually, there is tremendous pressure on Information Technology (IT) executives and personnel to control costs associated with managing the data. The desired cost goals may be achieved with an understanding of the types of data being managed, the data needing to be preserved, and the data that can safely and permanently be deleted.
In addition, it is difficult to efficiently access data and information about the data (or metadata) for a particular purpose given the large amounts of data within the repositories. In particular, one user may have a need to access a specific subset of data that is different from the needs of another user (e.g., a user may need to find documents that belong to Fred but not to Jane). The user may be required to manually translate a business concept (e.g., identity, department, vendor, etc.) into filters and other tools needed to access the specific type of data (or metadata) required for the business concept, which can be a tedious and inefficient process.